On the Road Again

After some months of not going anywhere, I drove to DC and back, then to Asheville and back this week.  1150-odd miles, all told. courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, numbers 40, 85, and 95 (and tributaries thereof).

It was good to get out, I had some good meals, saw some friends, met with some clients, as well as some prospects.

It was all capped a visit to the Addiction Medicine Conference sponsored by the Governor's Institute on Substance Abuse, of which I am now a board member, thanks to Matthew Sullivan of the Chapel Hill Police Department and now running the Fire Department, who had the good sense to throw my drunk ass in jail back in 1991, nudging me in the direction of recovery, eventually.

This was a good conference, as conferences go. It was pretty awesome to be in the company of doctors almost exclusively, to observe them trying to figure out how to do best by their patients. Mostly there was talk of heroin and other opioids, which are the things killing the most Americans these days. It was pretty amazing to dig into the complexity of it all.

Take Buprenorphine, for example. On the one hand, Bupe, as it is known in the field, is a promising tool in the treatment of opioid addiction, and there's a desire to expand its use in general. Unlike methadone, addicts don't have to go into the clinic every day to get a dose, you can write a month's prescription, making everyone's life easier. On the other hand, addicts have figured out that if you grind up certain types of Bupe (the generic, for instance), you can inject it and get really high. In some sense, it's not even the addicts doing the figuring out, it's the disease of addiction driving the process, using the addicts as slaves.

At about 6 yesterday, at the end of a long day, maybe 150 doctors were sitting there arguing the fine points of what type of Bupe should be given to pregnant women addicts: the straight variety, or mixed with Naloxone (long story).  They dug pretty deep into the discussion for 15 minutes. It was impressive, because they really cared.

Overall, that was the impression of the conference. A bunch of doctors who really cared about their patients trying to figure out how the heck to make their lives better. Full stop. I'll go back next year, if I can swing it.


One codicil: most of the doctors seemed to be Republicans, at least the older ones. I know that they work in a heavily regulated domain and resent the extent to which the government makes it hard for them to do their jobs and earn the livings they thought they would earn when they gave up years of their earning lives to med school and residency. But they also work closely with lower-income populations and people of color all day, and overall care deeply about these people's lives, you can see it and hear it when you talk to them. I would like to get to know more of them better to get a sense of what they think the right policy approaches are to our most vexing problems but, like all things, those are long and complicated conversations, and time is the most precious of all commodities in most contexts.

Mashing comfort

Got home this evening stressed out about a couple of things I have to do tomorrow, and was a little bummed that Graham hadn't done his homework, which meant there was no hope of watching Next Generation together while mashed together in the 20-year old, fast-degenerating armchair in my study, as we are wont to do. Nonetheless, we were able to get in about 40 minutes of reading on the couch while playing footsie.  I got better. Prolonged bodily contact with a child is so calming and grounding. Whatever will I do when he ages out of it, as Natalie did so long ago? (As documented here)

It is nice to snuggle with Mary too, admittedly, but it is somehow different. And she comes to bed so damned late.

Return to Northgate

I hadn't been to Northgate Mall in I don't know how long. Mostly I have fond memories of going there with my mom's parents and hitting the K&W Cafeteria and ordering pretty much one of everything: fried chicken, baked spaghetti, garlic bread, pie, cornbread. It was ridiculous, but beautiful in its own way.

That is long gone. In its place is a food court which is occupied, oddly enough, by chains you have never heard of. There is a fake Sbarros, an estwhile Cinnabons, etc. All the regular types of food stalls are there, they just aren't name brands. Which is odd, in some sense.

In another sense, it's not. Northgate is now a distinctly lower- to lower-middle wealth mall. Most of the people I saw there were people of color, and those that weren't weren't the fanciest.

I saw categories of stores I'd never seen before, including a cafe of smells, selling scented candles, oils, etc. It was presided over by a woman in hijab. There was a carousel, and a bouncy house. In the jewelry store, a woman was talking to a friend on the phone..

But most importantly, I found what I was looking for, a Radio Shack that was still open, and though they didn't have the adapter I needed for my phone headset, they had another perfectly nice and functional headset for 20 bucks.

My overriding feeling upon leaving the mall was that I really hope that Jeff Bezos does not succeed in his mission to consume the world. There were all these small shops there, selling people things they needed and things they didn't. Nobody was making much money, but they were all getting through the day in good form. And there was a bouncy house and a carousel, which Amazon conspicuously lacks.

Newfound limits

A couple of weeks ago, during a preseason soccer game, I pulled my right hamstring sprinting flat out on an overlapping run, which was a shame, because I had gotten past their striker, then the midfielder, and even the wing back, and all that was between me and the goal was their sweeper and keeper (both of them admittedly quite decent). It was a moment of considerable potential glory. And then my left calf seized up, followed immediately by the right hamstring.

So I nursed them and went kind of easy on them, went to practice a couple of times to play my way into shape, played another game. Then yesterday, I had gone forward, had an opportunity to strike the ball from not too far outside the opponent's box. I wound up and struck the ball well, and felt a vicious pain in my hammy.  I gave a good shriek, and was told subsequently that I cursed loudly.

I think I am starting to see some patterns here. My first season back I strained ligaments at the top of my quad from kicking goal kicks. My second season I sprained some fingers after leaving my feet to make a fantastic defensive play running at tippy-top speed. And now this.

I keep thinking that individual muscle groups are getting accustomed to playing flat out, while at the same time I'm getting a little education on the holistic limits of my body. I had no idea shooting the ball hard would mess up a hamstring like that. Never did before. I wonder why?

Josh says that he no longer kicks the ball hard, period. In general I have a hard time restraining myself. Take yesterday for example. I've never scored a goal from the area where I was shooting from, though, in principal, there's no good reason why I shouldn't. I can kick the ball pretty durned hard, and if I could just put it on target... well, it would be frickin awesome.

But my body has newfound limits, or at least at the level of conditioning where I am. The real question, then, is why I care. What does it matter to me that I ever score on a long shot? If I can acknowledge the danger of it, why can't I get it through my head that my body, at least as currently constituted, resists a wide range of actions carried out at 100%?  Why can't I learn to operate at 85%?

Part of it, I think, is that I still haven't fully overcome growing up scrawny and not all that athletic. Puberty was immensely helpful, yes. I became an athlete, but most of my athletic success was on account of gross motor skills (speed, jumping, fearlessness, kicking the ball long), not skill and control. Or at least that's how I conceived of myself.

So I am loathe to let that go, even though I know that I have to graduate into a more statesmanlike role. Net net, I have to let go of the idea of chasing the dream, the highlight sequence for bedtime in which I strike the perfect strike or run the perfect run. Which is all the harder when the very idea of playing sports like soccer when already greying is holding on to the glory of adolescence.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book 3

So I just wrapped up Book 3 of Knausgaard's somehow stupendous work, and cannot wait to move on to Book 4, wherever it takes me. One of these days he's going to start about the crazy mass murderer fascist guy up there in Norway, for those of you who remember him. Here in America we have so many it's hard to keep them straight in our minds, sometimes.

In any case, it continues to be a remarkable piece of work, first and foremost in the extent to which, by digging deep into his own experience and holding nothing back (how he cried all the time even at the age of 13 and was mocked for it, how he was called a "jessie" [apparently an effeminate male] and fag-baited in middle school) he lets the reader -- or this one at least -- access his own memories. Of course, this is the most standard stuff of realistic narrative -- reader identifying with narrator -- and in theoretical circles one of the most hotly contested claims of literature, that it's all illusory blah blah blah.

But the great thing about being out of the business of literature is of course that I don't have to care about any of that. I can just read and think and write whatever I freaking please, without having to worry about the theoretical legitimacy of what I'm saying, which is another way of saying I don't have to be concerned about marketing and positioning my writing. I can just fart it out.

The monumental egocentricity of me at 50

I will confess that I want the world to revolve around me today.  It is my 50th birthday, and I would very much like the traffic to part, the trees to bend down, and water to flow uphill. Even still, it was a little odd to launch a new screen in my browser and find that Google was wishing me happy birthday. Sergei and Larry are so sweet, so thoughtful.

In general, however, it is not happening. Though my work is buying me lunch, and my boss sent me home early, and a bunch of people have texted congratulations, and we are going out to dinner tonight, it is still very much a day like any other, albeit a lovely one,

My desire for world domination differs in degree if not in kind from my job in general, in which I endeavor to bend the world to my will by convincing people to entrust their financial wherewithal to me and my firm. Which is by no means easy. It is a world of continual attention begging, like the Hispanic kids in the subway crying to their mother:  "Mama, mira mira." (I don't know why this phrase and behavior stands out to me more for Hispanic kids than Anglo ones. I know my kids never begged for attention...).

At any rate, as always, let me just reiterate how much I appreciate the continued readership of all of you, even as I am able to dedicate ever-varying levels of attention to the craft of writing here. I would say that I do it for you, as in the immortal words of the dying nanny in The Omen ("It's all for you, Damien"), but of course I do it for me, because I appreciate your attention, which is, in this world of limitless communication channels, media, distractions, and demands on people's time, that most precious of commodities. Purest gold.

Life/Schedule: full vs. empty

On Sunday mornings I awake all too often with a sense of scarcity: my schedule for the day stretches about before me, leading too quickly into Monday, when it all begins again. This is particularly true on a day like today, when I have:

1. A memorial service
2. A soccer game
3. A charity concert

And also laundry (must do at mom's house while we wait for our new machine to arrive), summer scheduling, business trip scheduling, emails to friends. In the evening Graham and I will finish the last of the Bourne movies.

The fact is, I will enjoy these things and all of them will be done with people I love and are for good causes, but viewed beforehand they exhaust me (not the Bourne movie, to be sure).

A large part of me just wants to sit and look out the window and read and think and, yes, write. There are all these books on my shelves that call out for attention, as do my guitar and bass. Deep in the basement, my bicycle is also neglected.

In short, my life is full, and part of me resents the external things that pull me away from the things that I "want" to do.  But I also know from experience that, when I have lots of free time, and this has happened during periods when I have been in "career transition," I panic and cannot focus on the long-term things that I theoretically should be doing. 

And hell, even now, as I am building my business, during the week it is not as if I am always overwhelmed with client work. Much of the time I am out looking for clients, really looking for attention. It is the nature of being relatively early stage in a business.

So, in some sense, this is just a short-cycle "grass is greener" thing. I need to learn to use the fallow time during the week to do some of the things I want to do on weekends.

Vive la difference

I had coffee this week with an older African American gentleman whom I had met recently, and it came too light that he was a Republican. It surprised me to meet a black Republican,, especially in North Carolina these days, so after we talked for a while about business and basic getting to know you stuff I brought the conversation around to politics.

He said that he felt that Obama had done a lot of things to mess up the country, and especially around gay marriage.  Earlier that week, he said, while doing some outreach work for his church, he had taken a fellow parishioner who was blind into the county clerk's office. While there, a marriage between two women was being officiated. It seems from his recounting that they had their hands all over themselves, because he gently launched into a little peroration about marriage being about more than sex and affection and so on.

He also said that he was on the board of some charter schools and that he was astounded at the attitudes of kids that things should and would just be handed to them. The fundamental grounding for his support for the Republicans was that he felt they were just more pro-business, as he was. I must say, being out in the business world, I get that. Compliance is hard, and in many ways it is much easier to promulgate regulation than it is to right-size it. It honestly gets scaled back by the sheer difficulty of funding and administering its enforcement.

It is difficult to engage in values-based discussions of politics with people who come from backgrounds different from your own. For one, we're always just working on earning our own livings and/or taking care of our own offspring. Or writing our own blogs. But there is very little that is more important.

Bread crumbs

I was at a very foody event towards the end of the day Friday, and the chef was describing the bread crumbs that were the component of one of the dishes:  "The bread crumbs come from bread from bakery X in Durham, which was made from organic flour from farm Y somewhere out in the country," honestly there were probably significantly more words involved than that. It was more than over the top. He just kept talking so much.

It reminded me of my resistance to excessive adjectives and other modifiers on menus in fancy restaurants up in New Jersey.  I see I have written about this before.

Mary pointed out that it was really just marketing and, as being someone engaged frequently in sales and marketing, I suppose I should get that. Even still, it was a bit much. I would have rather had more time to just eat and chat with the people at my table rather than be hit over the head by this authoritative voice from above telling me about the virtues of all the small producers and farmers in the region, which is really just one story, made flesh by many hands.

Driving self and family

In the middle of volume 3, young Knausgaard and his family are driving north to his mother's parents' farm in summer. He describes passing rest areas along the road where people stopped and had picnics.

"I would ask after seeing such a rest areas because breaks, alongside ferry crossings, belonged to the high points of the journey. We, too, had a cooler bag in the trunk; we, too, had a thermos, juice, and a little pile of plastic glasses, cups, and plates with us. "Don't pester me," Dad would say then, desperate to cover as many kilometers as he could in one go. That meant, at the very least, we would have to drive to the end of Setesdalen, past Hovden and Haukeligrend and up Mount Haukeli, before the question of a break even came into consideration. Then we would have to find a suitable place because we would not take the first opportunity, oh no:  if the stops were few and far between, then the location of the rest area had to be something special."

I won't go so far as to say that my dad was just like this, but it rings very true, both for him and for me. I recognize even in myself the intense focus on covering enough ground to justify the stop, as if there is some sort of metaphysical or moral measure there. How could one stop after only 35 minutes? We have not earned it. Where does this logic come from? Whence this excess sternness, this completely superfluous goal orientation.

I know that, on long trips, I am constantly counting time, miles, gas mileage, thinking about traffic we are likely to hit around DC, or New York, or whatever. I am, at least, pretty decent about taking rest stops whenever. I am, indeed, the prime urinator on our trips, though I get it honest, to be sure, as a man fast approaching 50. So I'm not a stop Nazi about that stuff.

But there are other things. I hate to cross over so that we need to make a left turn when we're done with our stop. I had totally forgotten it, but Leslie assures me I got this from dad.

Reading Buffett's letters

A couple of years ago I got a copy of Warren Buffett's collected annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, from 1965-2012. Like many books, it sat on my shelf for some time, calling out to me occasionally for attention. A couple of weekends ago I started making my way through it, and I've now read through 1976. Here are a few initial observations.

• The early letters are pretty dry. He hasn't yet found his sea legs as the "Oracle of Omaha," but you can see wisdom emerging in them. Or maybe I'm just imputing it to the text because I know what he develops into later.
• He never talks about Berkshire Hathaway's stock price. Although in the charts and tables at the beginning of the book (not published by Berkshire Hathaway itself) we can see how the stock did relative to the S&P 500, as well as the growth in its book value (Buffett's preferred metric), he never brings it up.
• In fact, there aren't that many numbers at all. Buffett talks mostly in broad strokes about factors impacting the various operating businesses.
• He is unfailingly gracious. Mostly, he praises the executives running the underlying operating businesses by name. When a business unit has a failure, he doesn't call out people by name.
• Berkshire Hathaway was originally a textiles business, and it was going south already by the time Buffett bought it, but Buffett continued to prop it up because the business was a major employer in the New England towns where it operated. He cites the importance of these businesses as employers explicitly as reasons to keep the businesses going. He was a good guy from the beginning, and outside shareholders weren't pressing him to make profits at all costs from day 1.
• Odd things impact businesses in unexpected ways. Nixon's going off the gold standard and putting in place wage and price freezes in 1971 messed up the textiles business pretty good. More importantly, jury awards in the mid-70s changed what insurers had to pay on policies, effectively extending the liabilities of Berkshire's insurance subsidiaries and screwing with their businesses. Buffett just calls this "social inflation," explains what it is in few words and how it affects the insurance subsidiaries, and gets on with his business. He does not bemoan fate, or call in armies of lobbyists. Or at least he doesn't talk about it.

I'll keep reading and report back periodically.

Anger management

I was having some trouble downloading some pdfs and jpegs this woman had sent us for an invite to Mary's upcoming show at the Frank Gallery and I found myself pounding on my desk. Sometimes I get frustrated when I feel I am overextended and have too many things pulling at me.

Clearly this is a function of failing to set boundaries, to define what I should be doing and what I shouldn't be, to prioritize, etc. etc. I think it comes up more in connection with Mary, probably, because it is all too easy to get mad at your spouse because, in some sense, that's what they are for. They can be repositories and targets for all the frustrations we can't vent on the outside world, because to do so would be unseemly.

Easter egg MVP

Our tradition in recent years has been that Natalie hides Easter eggs for Graham to find, and vice versa.  This year it is very wet and rainy, so we did it inside. Graham hid (and Natalie searched) upstairs. After about 15 minutes or so, she had about 18 of 20 and had done pretty thorough searching, so she decided to throw in the towel and head downstairs for some feasting.

At about that time Rascal, the more social of our two cats, appeared on the staircase and nudged a pink egg through the banister. It crashed to the ground and opened, spraying jelly beans across the floor. She is a clever one.

Movers

We moved offices a week or so back. The whole moving crew was young African-American guys, with the exception of one Hispanic fellow.

When it came time to order them lunch, I took on the arduous chore (I jest, lest you linger in doubt) of getting their orders. We were going to order from Jimmy John's, but a number of them weren't familiar with that establishment, and were a little uncomfortable ordering from a place where they didn't know the menu. One of them was uncomfortable ordering roast beef that was pink, he liked it brown. Several of them asked for extra mayo, one of them wanted extra oil and vinegar. I tend to view sandwiches from chains as commodities (though I do know what I like from Subway, etc.), but I had the impression that this was a pretty novel experience for some of these guys and they didn't want to squander it and/or get something they really wouldn't like.

Later, one of them had apparently been talking to our Chief Investment Officer about what we did, and was asking for financial advice. The CIO said talk to me about how much money one needed to work with us, and I sheepishly named a figure well below what is considered the minimum for having a profitable client relationship, while saying I'd be happy to just talk to him. Unfortunately I didn't have a card on me, and didn't connect with the guy later. I would have liked to have been able to just tell him the basics (save, don't try to get rich quick by beating market, use revolving credit cards warily).

These guys were working their butts off, carrying heavy boxes and furniture up stairs. When they realized how late their day was likely to go (ended up being till about 9pm), they groaned a little. They marvelled at the machine the guys from the copier company had, which slowly moved the delicate copier up the stairs.

I'm making an effort to chronicle all this because, in fact, at this point in time in my life I have so little contact with younger Black people. For the most part, I interact with African-Americans primarily on Facebook, where I'm connected with lots of people from my high school. This is considerably better than nothing. Especially since being fast-tracked academically as a youth put me in what was essentially a segregated school environment.

At times I can only agonize that the nature of my profession is so intensely focused on helping middle-class and richer people defend their class status. I see younger Black so rarely.  There is one kid from a rehab that has been turning up at the Sunday morning AA meeting I have been going to regularly who comes from an entirely different place than me, but who speaks so beautifully, who seems to be really getting it. I need to make my way across the room to him next time I am there and introduce myself, before he is hustled into the waiting van and taken back to rehab. I don't know why they do that.

Fear and the father

I'm making my way through Volume 3 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle now. This tome tracks the young Karl Ove and his family as they move to a new subdivision on an island in southern Norway and begin a new life, in his case, school. So it starts when he's 5 or so.

As with the other volumes, it rings true emotionally. In particular Karl Ove's fear of his father, his self-consciousness moving around the house, his concern that his dad my blow up at him at any moment. This is really the primary shading of our narrator's life, the fear of being chastised for just about anything, the cold distance of the father.

One episode in particular stands out. Karl Ove and his dad are alone in the house before school, and his dad feeds him some corn flakes (about which he had already waxed poetic) for breakfast. The milk his dad had given him had gone bad, but Karl Ove, fearing his dad's temper, eats his bowl of cereal anyway. Then his dad sits down to join him:

"Ugh!" he said "The milk's off! Oh, good grief"

Then he looked at me. I would remember that look for the rest of my life. His eyes were not angry, as I had expected, but amazed, as though he was looking at something he could not comprehend. Indeed, as though he were looking at me for the very first time.

And here it is as if Knausgaard has pulled the curtain back on a whole new layer of consciousness, the father who cannot begin to fathom the level of fear he instills in his son.

I get it. As an adult I am still driven by my own demons, my own insecurities, despite the profusion of grey hair on my head, and it is hard at times to imagine how my own behavior is perceived by my kids. What is it they say: "There are no real grown ups." We just look like them, we just play the roles.

Anyhow, it is now time to go play the role. If I can get dinner nudged through quickly enough, there might just be time enough for me and Graham to watch an episode of Next Generation. Or we can just lie on the couch and read with our feet under the blanket.

Turning a corner

Just glanced at the blog and was surprised to see the consistent negativity there. That shows I have been slipping in my ability to appreciate the good stuff around me. For example, I now have an office with four walls and everything, and it is Spring and everything is in bloom or bud.

Yesterday I picked up Natalie from her ultimate game out at Friends School and it occurred to me that she could drive home from there. So she did.  It was late in the day, so there was tail end of rush hour traffic, albeit on country roads, and there was some slightly blinding light from the horizon, so she wore a baseball cap and used the visor too. But she handled it all like a champ, accelerating as high as 45 momentarily. She has come a considerable distance from her major tear-spouting the first time I picked her up from behind the wheel training, which just broke my heart.

In any case, yesterday was lovely.

Fight or flight? Flight

After the meeting today, I went up to this guy who had shared about going to a meeting somewhat randomly while he was out of town and then having the opportunity to commune with a newcomer. He had told it beautifully, and I engaged with him on the topic.

I said something that set him off, and he started talking. It quickly became clear that I had unwittingly placed myself in the grip of a dogmatist. He started talking about how there were people who came to meetings that weren't really alcoholics, but were really just heavy drinkers, as was described in AA's Big Book, and they weren't really alcoholics because blah blah blah blah blah. And I was looking at the clock, feeling annoyance rise from deep within me as my Sunday slipped away from me listening to this guy who felt a need to share his authoritative wisdom. I was saved by someone telling us that a steering committee meeting was about to convene, and I made my way to the bathroom.

I know damn good and well whence comes my aversion to this kind of person. I won't even say it.

Thursday night, I was at Local 506 for a friends and clients meeting of a law firm with whom I am friends. I saw this grey-haired lawyer holding a beer talking to a buddy of mine and I said to myself, "he looks familiar, I'll bet he knew dad." So I went over and talked to them and my friend introduced us and, sure enough, he knew dad, and told me he had a story to tell me.

So many years before, in the early 90s, he had been returning from the beach through the sleepy, moss-hung town of Maysville with his family when he saw a barefooted guy on the side of the road with a pillowcase over his shoulder, thumbing a ride.  At which point in time he says to his wife "That was Mike Troy, I gotta go back and pick him up." To which his wife responded "Are you crazy? We have 3 kids in the car, there's no room." But he picked up dad anyway.  Apparently dad and his then girlfriend had had a tiff of some sort and dad set out to make it home using only feet and thumb. In any case, for the lawyer and his family, the ride back to Chapel Hill passed more quickly and easily than it ever had before, as my dad regaled the kids with stories and jokes of this, that and the other.

So there you have it. If you were subjected to a lot of my dad, he was overbearing and ultimately unbearable, because it became apparent that he was incapable of listening to others, because he knew the answers to everything already. If, on the other hand, you saw him only rarely, he was almost a magical figure, because he always had another story to fill the gaps.

Flow

I have now arrived at the moment when I have become accustomed to blogging each week, Saturday morning, between Al Anon and taking Graham to martial arts. If I can permit myself, it is a time of relative quiet and reflection, before I snap into being dad and spouse. Often I have a clear topic in mind.

Not so today. Came home and was distracted at trying to fix one practical matter (I won't bore you with it), then went to close the windows upstairs because it's chilly and promises to continue being so. While doing so, in my peripheral vision I saw something describe an arc. I turned and focused on it, and saw it was a red-tailed hawk alighting from one branch to another down the hill. Now, I'm not going to break all mystical on you about the beauties of nature, but I will say that it is very cool to see hawks flitting from branch to branch like that in the yard, even though I should allow that it is odd that we should consider it calming to see mighty predators like that hanging out by the crib.

Reminds me of seeing Jeff, the guy who is responsible for The Monti series of live storytelling around the Triangle here, telling a tale of going running in the Carolina North woods (to those of us who grew up in and around Glen Heights back in the day, these were known just as "the woods") and mysteriously losing his hat. Turned out, he later figured out, it was stolen by an owl, most likely, which he realized when he heard of others losing their hats in the woods. I kinda suspected it from the beginning, because I remember Mike Long sharing on Facebook about being attacked in his yard by a hawk while doing yard work in Cary one day.

But the topic of the Monti, where I have long thought of trying to speak, makes me think of what should be a real, longer blog post, which will draw together themes I have shared over the years, and which could turn into a Monti talk.....

stay tuned

The inner game, spoken

Out on the tennis court with Z today, I found myself yelling at myself things like "Stupid!" when I made poor shot selection or just executed poorly. I had to remind myself that I would never speak to someone else like that, and wonder why I do it to myself.

The tendon tenderness I've been experiencing for a couple of months now didn't cripple me, which makes me optimistic for soccer season, coming on fast.

Crazy talk

At the end of the work day I met with a couple of youngish ladies in the lobby of a Marriott Courtyard Suite where 54 hits 55, just off 40 so I could be schooled in how to maintain a web site built on WordPress. Not too difficult.

As we sat there, corporate travelers streamed into the hotel with their little rolly bags, seeking direction as to where to go and eat, "Where can we get bbq, or a steak?" Perversely, I found myself a little jealous of the simplicity of their lives: go get dinner, go to hotel room, sleep, get up and go present at client or perform project work, collect salary.

Amazing how quickly the grass starts to look greener on the other side. Hell, what do I know? For all I know those people carried heavy sales quotas. I used to hate business travel, and rightly so.

Short takes

Quickly on some books I've read recently:

Red Notice.  Hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who was robbed blind and kicked out of Russia by Putin some years ago, wrote this book about his own trajectory, but more about Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who was on his team and was pretty much killed in Russian prison but refused to repent or submit to pressure to lie. This is a good, not a great book, but it gives considerable insight into how business was done in Russia back in the day, and, more importantly, Browder shows himself to have been truly indefatigable in campaigning in DC for justice for Magnitsky and sanctions against the Putin regime by the US government. Also gives a pretty good window into how DC works, the importance of access to people who know people.  "Human capital," as it were.

The Last Girls, My dad idolized Lee Smith, really worshipped the ground she walked on. She represented all that he aspired to in the Hillsborough literary scene. And, as human a human being as he was, I figured I'd give her a shot, and I picked this book up at Nice Price in Durham one day when I took the kids there (just as he and my mom had always taken us to used book stores). This is a good novel, not mind-blowing, but a solid, humane, earnest piece of humanism geared at helping us understand how people grow and how they come to feel about the complex trajectories of their lives as they live them. As a plus, as the title states, it's mostly about women, a group of them, so as a male it's helpful to me in terms of getting women's perspectives on life.

And, for all the rigor mortis that successive waves of theory threw at literature and art in recent decades, this is a noble function, and not easy. I will read more Lee Smith. In this, as in many things, my dad was not wrong.

The Old Man and the Sea, I snagged this nugget of Hemingway in the PTA Thrift one day last year. We were in there and we ran into Juan, the father of Graham's classmate Jasper, who piped enthusiastically about having picked up a first edition of this book there. And then I saw this little volume at that PTA discount.

In contrast to the Lee Smith, and not surprisingly for old Earnest, this is a book about being a man. An old guy who hasn't caught anything for a long time goes out and hooks a big one and struggles mightily to bring it to shore, showing great respect for his adversary. It's a riff on Moby Dick.

A fine book, reminds me of the benefits of going back and re-reading the people I used to read (though this was my first time with this one). All too often I treat books like scalps or trophy kills, I want to bag them and put them on my wall. Why, after all, am I writing these little reviews?  In fact, there is much benefit in going back and revisiting things that used to seem meaningful.

Decoded, Ma Jia. I have no idea how this contemporary Chinese "mystery" novel came to my attention. At first it seemed good, kind of mythic in its ambition and scope. As it progressed it seemed to devolve into something infused with Socialist Realism. Sort of ham-handed. Honestly, I didn't finish it. Something in me wants to go back and finish it, but I probably won't.

The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, Jeff Connaughton. A decent, not a great book, by a guy who had a successful career in the revolving door of DC, mostly within the sphere of influence of Joe Biden.  He was alternately a staffer and a lobbyist. Basically his point is that Wall Street throws lots of money at getting heard in DC and gets heard loud and clear. For the last bit of his time in DC, Connaughton worked for Ted Kaufman, the guy who filled Biden's seat in DC after he ascended to become Obama's veep. Kaufman and Connaughton faught Wall Street's influence on some important matters but couldn't really notch that many victories, because there was too much to fight.

Once that was done, Connaughton took his substantial hard-earned cash, moved to Savannah, and wrote this book. So it's one of those: make your million, step out, criticize the system.

Connaughton in particular was not positive about Biden, viewing him as an opportunist user with a short memory for his footsoldiers (of whom Connaughton was one). That's why I was very pleased that Biden was so kind to Niklaus and Lucy when he came to Duke a month or so back.

Snit

Just came home from my morning meeting, and saw a multitude of tasks needing to be done around the house. Got on Mary and Natalie about doing them, and Mary justly pushed back against me, saying that she was just trying to get work done, and I come home and sigh exasperatedly about things needing to be done that weren't priorities.  She then told me about stuff that needed to be done in the yard that she needed help with, to which I protested that I have taxes and other financial stuff to work on.

Not an optimal marital dynamic. Division of labor is hard, balancing fluid priorities is hard, particularly in the absence of clearly stated strategic goals. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey suggests having something like a family constitution or set of strategic goals that can guide lower level and implementation-level decision-making. It sounds so unbearably corporate and geeky, but maybe there is some wisdom in it.

My resistance to VR

I just finished up with Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget.  I hadn't read a book like that for a long time, sort of wacky and wildly interdisciplinary yet very cogent and, which is perhaps more important, very humane.

Lanier is one of the inventors of Virtual Reality, which is one of those concepts which, though cool, has never really held much attraction for me. I tend to view VR as too much like doing drugs, as if it would be consciousness out of control and therefore scary.

Tech geniuses like Lanier are a bit like that in toto-- "scary smart" with a polymathic ability to range across domains which can be intimidating. Admittedly, if I had enough financial freedom and confidence to just talk to whomever and write freely, I might do OK.

For the time being, maybe personal finance attracts me in its relative finiteness. Though it can be god-awful boring at times.

Hilary and the conservative impulse

This most surely is a kooky electoral season, as is evidenced by the fact that the NY Times today reported that some Republicans have come to the conclusion that, if push were actually to come to shove and Trump was their nominee, the only rational choice left to them would be to vote for Hilary.

I must confess that, deep within myself, I know that in fact the impulse to vote for Hilary is in many ways driven by a certain conservatism. Watching Bernie posture and orate reminds me of the old saw, that, and I don't have this verbatim, that if you are not a socialist at the age of 20 you have no heart, but if you aren't a conservative at the age of 50 you have no brain. Bernie is a beautiful soul, his heart is in the right place, but so much of what he advocates is impracticable and would impact the USA negatively.  In saying that, I am reiterating if not outright regurgitating what many others have said and say daily.

And it feels right for me to say it because I am such an outlandish beneficiary of the status quo, and therefore am deeply bought in. In so many ways, I am rentier coasting on quantitative easing. I could explain that, but it would take to long to do so and I have to take Graham to the library and then to the school to kick a soccer ball.  Just the fact that our library and school facilities are good enough to be worth going to tells a story right there.

Therefore, I vote for Hilary because she's the most likely not to upset the apple cart, while doing ethically defensible things, for the most part. And yes, because she is ultimately the most qualified of all the candidates, but that's just what makes it easier to vote for the one who won't rock my world.

Turning 50

I was corresponding with a high school friend this week who said she was freaking out about turning 50, I honestly hadn't reflected on it that much, though I am ever mindful that the half-century mark si coming up for me mighty soon, but now that I pause to think about it maybe it has been weighing on me more than I care to admit.

40 was big, and I marked it with an excellent party in Chapel Hill with some of my oldest friends, even though I lived in Princeton at the time. For 50 I haven't planned an event, somehow I am slightly loath to do so, but why?  At some level I must confess it is probably driven by a little bit of shame about where I am professionally, which I conceive on most days as struggling to get my practice up and running.

Why I can't view myself as ever building towards living the dream, that I can't tell you. I do know that I can't help but to compare myself to peers who are more stable and are just flat out kicking ass on many cylinders. I know that I profit little by doing so, and even hurt myself by doing so, but it is hard to break the pattern.

Frankly, it is only by getting out and putting myself into positive contexts that remind me of how fortunate I am that I am able to get a proper perspective. Which is why I have to keep doing that. Also getting plenty of sleep helps too.

Time to take Graham to martial arts.

The value of insurance

At a Chamber of Commerce lunch today, I was blathering to someone next to me in line as I squeezed the bbq sauce bottle, which was a little stuffed up, and it went all over my white shirt. Luckily, I had another, brand new white shirt in a drawer at work, and I put that one on.  My former colleague Elizabeth had left a bottle of some sort of spray-on that was designed for carpet cleaning and which, naturally, was effective on getting a stain out of a white shirt. So the one I put on this morning is fine again now.

Baring it all, or not

On the way back from a leads group this morning I heard on NPR about alarmingly high suicide rates amongst those who are on reality TV. I hadn't stopped to consider the relationship between reality TV and the social media phenomenon, the whole idea of normal people living their lives increasingly in public, baring more and more to more and more of the world. I'm sure there are reams of books on this topic, they just are in the category of ones I haven't read.

It took me back to Jaron Lanier's book and how I need to push through to the end of it. As well as Knausgaard, who apparently screwed up many of his own relationships by being too open in his series.

I have long made it a practice not to talk too much about work or marriage here on the Grouse. I sometimes feel disingenuous in putting this limit on it, because these are big factors in my life, to be sure, and there are stressors in each of them. But I know in the end this is a rational limit, because I am basically fortunate to have both work and to be married, that nothing in life is perfect, that all problems are to be worked through, and it just doesn't make sense to open the kimono too far to too many.

Then there's the whole other angle of performativity, the shaping of one's life by its being a performance. There are many angles to this. Back to work.

Sneaking it in, almost

At a beach house with friends, in an exceptionally nice place, it must be owned.  After a breakfast made late by our own drowsiness, everyone else walked off to the beach to begin the day's excursions and activities. I feel that's a little like trying to make the European trip of 12 countries in 5 weeks. I am also a little lazy.

So Knausgaard and I repaired to the roof deck, where I sat in the son and a gentle breeze and listened to birds, interrupted only by the gentle and ever present droning of climate control and yes, a small plane or two off in the distance. As he rounds the corner towards the end of Book 2 of My Struggle, which has been a harder slog than Book 1, Knausgaard is beginning to tie things up.  400 pages after we left him, we are reunified with him as he smokes a cigarette after the 50 page birthday party which began the book. 10 pages after that, we rejoin him and his whole family as they leave some playground where he and his wife had been fuming at each other at the very beginning of the book, I think. The whole thing coheres more and more. There is method to his at times seeming overindulgence in detail.

Over breakfast here in this bastion of the almost if not quite 1% there were typical discussions of for-profit corporations and the need for more regulation thereof and income inequality. It always makes me feel more than a little guilty, given what I do for a living, which is help people hold onto their money, and much of that involves counseling them to think about the ways the US tax code incents certain behaviors. To be sure, most of my clients don't have enough money to be doing anything exotic. It's all about 401ks, 403bs, 529s, being mindful of capital gains, holding onto receipts associated with legitimate business expenses, etc.

A loud noise just came on downstairs.  The pump?  Hard to say. Too loud to think and write, that's for sure.

At any rate, back to my initial premise for this post, sitting there on the roof, in the sun and the breeze, I was reminded of you, my reader, and our implicit contract. That is, it was a quiet time on Saturday morning, the mind was relaxed and fruitful, therefore it was time to Grouse.

The need for humanists

Bill Gates came out with his annual letter yesterday.  I haven't read it yet, but I did read excerpts from an interview he did in connection with it, in which he says this.

If you zoom out a little bit, and you look at the acceleration of science over the past 100 years, and the basic understanding we have gained and the tools we have, and the percentage of people in the world getting literate and getting engineering degrees, those numbers are on the constant rise.

Of course the humanist in me wishes he had rued the absence of people getting humanities degrees, but he didn't. The market pricing of those certainly indicates that the world thinks it is getting enough of them, and it is always difficult to argue with the market.

Certainly the humanities have done a good job of shooting themselves in the foot by trying to be ever holier in thou in their calls for ever greater purity and complexity around a greater number of granular behavioral standards. Although, at root, humanists are trying to address the big questions, they all too often shy away from letting the questions stay big and letting students wrestle with them to apply the big to the small in their own lives. Instead, they concentrate on the small, and treat lack of fealty thereto as treason against the big.

Buried deep within the current state of the humanities is a belief that absolute progress in ethics can be made, that we can stand on the shoulders of our elders. I tend to doubt that, though certainly our legal code and institutional infrastructure can instantiate progress, individuals must individually come to their own understandings of and positions on the big questions.

Then again, the fact that more than enough people go out and get degrees in the humanities and social sciences at least attests to the fact that lots of people really do want to do good. And the drift of people like Gates from tooth and nail profit-making to trying to address the big questions also attests to the fact that the big questions eventually exert their pull on, if not everyone, than many.

So maybe we don't need more humanists. But we could use more respect, if only we could earn it.

Downton Abbey, the final season

I will say this. They have been digging deep to make a plot in this season's Downton Abbey, and at times it has been slow going and has even gotten quite silly. But I am OK with that. Yes, the show is sentimental and maudlin and hopelessly idealize, but it still works for me, and it works on me. Almost every week, I find myself moved to tears by some stupid little crap. Somebody steps up and does something large and magnanimous and it is moving.

I will be sad to see it end. Then, what will I have to get Mary to come sit on the couch with me and watch TV with any regularity at all? PBS has itself not found a worthy heir.

Watching Star Trek

I see from a quick scan of the blog that I have mentioned watching Star Trek with Graham a number of times over the last year, which is not surprising, because we have been doing it regularly. As the Grouse has matured over the years, I have drifted ever more into the reflective mode, veering away from the descriptive, archival purpose that was one of the things I was trying to do when I started: just write down what I was doing and what it felt like. More for the future me than for non-me readers in the present.

Actually watching Star Trek: Next Generation with Graham goes like this. First, we wedge ourselves into the armchair in the corner, which is itself a venerable artefact, having been bought right when Mary and I started going out right at 21 years ago. The chair has survived quite a lot, two infants/toddlers and a dog. We'll leave it at that. Right now, it is beginning to disintegrate in places, hastened, I believe, by the extra wear and tear of the two of us sitting there. Oh well, it is rather cozy. I will be sad when we are too big to sit there together. We hold hands a lot.

After the 2-3 minute segment introducing the plot runs, the theme music and opening credits start rolling. I personally like to whistle the theme, but Graham finds that "incredibly annoying," so I have desisted. How I wish we could ban the use of the word "annoying" from our household, but that would be hard.

Then the show starts in earnest. Graham often takes exception to technical details in the plot, little bits of illogic therein. So he starts to blather about them and try to essentially outsmart the script writers. His objections may actually delve into correction of Trekie pseudoscience, pointing out how one episode contradicts another: ("In the episode with the Quillians they said that an antimatter-matter imbalance would result in an implosion, not an explosion," something like that) I'm sure I did this when I was younger. Shit, I kind of do it now.

But when we are mashed together in the armchair, I am often trying to follow the plot myself and either do my best to ignore him or shush him. I don't know if that's the best tactic, but I'll be damned if I don't want to follow the show.

On days when I am very tired, I may lean my head back and drift off to sleep a little. Honestly, that's the best.

Earning Spring

It's supposed to be a very mild, Spring-like day today here, following a short period of wintry weather, and I can't shake the feeling that Spring has, in some way, not been earned.  I probably don't need to dig back too far to figure out where this line of thinking/feeling originates:  it feels rather Christian, WASPy, this idea that good things must be earned by depriving yourself of them, and that you can't just have them because they are there.

In fact, I half wonder whether this attitude might not be shaded by the
fact that the Christian worldview was so intensively formed within the 4-season paradigm of Europe. Certainly Ecclesiastes 3 ("To everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven") was written within a climatic zone where the difference between winter and summer was less dramatic than what people experienced in temperate Europe, and in particular the northern Europe whence Protestantism and its intense notions of predestination took shape. But it certainly feels right that the northern seasons imbued the cyclical worldview of Ecclesiastes with deeper coloring. I would be shocked if there aren't a number of books written about this topic.

Speaking of cyclicality and earning things in a fundemental, ethical sense, there's also the question of demographics, market cycles, and debt, and the way generations lord their sacrifices over on their kids and grandkids. So people brought up during the Depression and the "The Greatest Generation" guilt-tripped to Boomers about their consumption and failure to save.  Or the deep anxiety and recrimination we feel about taking on huge amounts of federal debt for our kids to pay off during a period of negatively shifting dependency ratios (i.e. lower ratio of workers to retirees).

To bring it back to my initial point: lurking inches behind my feelings about "earning Spring" is the worry about global warming, of course, and we all know that has been foisted upon our children.

Then there's the issue of my always trying to interpret things based on religious-cultural background. Sometimes I think the course that I took with Juan Linz based on Weber's Economy and Society back in my sophomore year in college influenced my thinking so profoundly precisely because I did so little of the reading, because it was so boring.

All the Rage

I had the pleasure of joining in a viewing of Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky's work in progress All the Rage, a documentary about John Sarno, an NYU-based physician whose radical work on back pain and pain in general, which focuses intensively on the connection between mind, emotion and body and rejects musculo-skeletal determinism prevalent in mainstream medicine. Sarno has not, to be sure, been a figure welcomed in the medical establishment.

The film focuses just as much on Galinsky and his family's own connection to Sarno. First his father, than his twin brother, then Michael have been helped if not permanently cured of back pain and other issues by Sarno, and Michael's desire to legitimize and raise consciousness around Sarno's work has been a long-running and entirely heartfelt effort for a goodly while by now. And it's more than that too, in many ways Galinsky is reaching to make a deep, holistic statement about life, family, ambition, self-worth, how we treat ourselves... there's a lot of stuff going on. You'll have to see it when it comes out.

But here's the thing. I identified with a lot of Michael's journey. We're from the same place, same generation, issues with dads (who doesn't have em), ambition, worrying about how what he does impacts his kids, blah blah blah, he's telling a universal story through his own experience, and in a very open way.

But my story, my conflicts with my dad and our own family narrative (including plenty of stuff from my mom's side has always been filtered through the lense of substance abuse and affective disorders. So when the film started trotting out statistics about how big of a problem chronic pain, and in particular back pain, was in America ("$600 billion annual economic impact") I found myself feeling left out. Because though I've had intermittent and sporadic issues with back pain, it's never been more than that, or so I was thinking...

And, sure enough, like clockwork, I had back pain when I went home that night. The same kind of seemingly causeless upper back pain that I've had before, now and again.  And of course, it has been recurring with greater frequency since then. It's almost like my back and my body are willing me to have recourse to Dr. Sarno and his book, because it seems like such an appealing paradigm: journaling, being in touch with the feelings which lie at the root of your pain, etc.

In the middle of writing this post, on a cold day, I drove out to big box land to get some running tights, having left my other ones in Larchmont over Christmas. I always leave something there. As I may have mentioned, I am no fan of the big boxes, and on my way out I found myself getting pissed off at a variety of Andy Rooney-type things: the traffic (which, viewed differently, is but a natural outgrowth of Chapel Hill's anti-development policy which pushes all that stuff out to the Durham border, and living in a succesful metro area), how expensive stuff is (anger and shame at myself for not having found the fabled easy path to sustainable revenue).  And yes, my back was twinging, though it abated a bit as I looked at those pulling into the shopping center and saw how many lands they seemed to hail from. Made me proud for a moment to be in a reasonably hospitable corner of America.

More time passed, ice came down over a long weekend, and I realized that I in fact have had more intermittent back pain than I was giving myself credit for. Had I not, for example, called up my friend David the neurologist at some point in time and gotten a reference to a book about exercises to do to calm the aches back there? Had I not had Graham walk on my back many many times? Did I not, after many months of working through the CFP curriculum, start standing at my desk for 3-4 hours a day to mitigate pain.

Oh yes, gentle reader, all of these things are true, all of them I have done. I have just not focused on my back pain as being a core issue. But now, my back hurts. I am in the game. Better get the book, and add it to the pile.

Competition, self-promotion

I just scrolled through Facebook and was happy and supportive of every post I saw until I came to the post of someone who was promoting their work. An actual friend, someone who has been successful and has worked his/her butt off to do so, someone who has fought past a type of adversity I have not and has done so with aplomb. Yes, it is also someone with some issues, for sure, who has been involved in conflicts with friends and others I'm close to.

At any rate, I arrived at this self-promotional post and my la la everything is so happy and nice mood was spoiled.

But why? Who else do I expect will promote this person if not him/herself?  I know I have to push my own stuff, however conflicted I may be about doing so. Whence this instinct to compete at all times and therefore, at some level, to wish to tear others down? Where else but from my own self-image issues.

I must go back and like that post just now.

What we're burning

This winter we are burning through logs from the tree that was taken down in our front yard in November of  2013.  The wood from this tree was impossible to split at first, destroying a maul and then challenging me mightily even after I went out and got a shiny new axe. I remember whacking and flailing away at it futilely in the driveway as runners and walkers went by, with very limited success and no little embarassment.

So I let it dry for a year.  Much of it split better, I guess we burnt some of it last winter.

This winter it is burning quite nicely, thank you very much. Even some of the big pieces that weren't of a good shape to be split, those are burning too.  It is very gratifying.

A good portion of the tree was chipped and placed at the back of our lot. It was a big assed pile. I spread it out as mulch to try to suppress the growth of the dreaded Japanese Stiltgrass, which it has done fairly successfully. That was a laborious task.

I would say that we are putting this tree to good use. When it is gone, I may have to go out and actually purchase firewood, which will be a bummer.

Refreshment

Now is the time, after my regular Saturday morning meeting, when I have gotten in the habit of blogging.  Usually my mind feels refreshed by having gotten up and gotten out to see like-minded folx, and today that is true to a limited extent.

The truth is, I am worn down right now mentally, emotionally, what have you, by the yoinky markets and the challenge of building a business. I feel responsible, undoubtedly excessively so, for other people's financial situations. Which is silly, because I can't control the markets, I didn't drive my clients' savings behaviors that got them to where they are today, I can't understand all the nuances of federal, state and (this month) New York City and perhaps some international tax code, and I can't single-handedly change behaviors. But still, I put a lot on myself. I have to remember that I am a generalist, and need to call specialists all the time, and that I am just one guy. But I want to do it all right.

In the evening, I am often tired, and I have found myself watching whatever is on ESPN at times. The other night I watched Iowa play Indiana, and I must say that I found myself rooting for Indiana, and wanting to go back to that point in my childhood where Indiana and Bobby Knight were the enemy. Obviously, it was really a longing for Dean Smith, my ethical father figure, and the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was our ideological antipode and America's moral and ethical role in the world was relatively clear.

It's also just nice to watch kids work hard towards a well-defined goal with clearly defined rules. In the end, the thing about sports is they are a pretty simple narrative, and one that is easily graspable, so long as you know the rules. If you get to know the players, so much the better.

As I watched, I also found myself loving, strangely enough, Dick Vitale. Indiana's point guard shot a three from 28 feet or so out and Vitale calls out "He launched one from Indianapolis!"  A couple of minutes later, they showed a replay and he said exactly the same thing. Rather than being annoyed, I was comforted by the familiar voice and, frankly, the genuine enthusiasm. Annoying as he may be, I think Vitale basically loves the game, and what's not to like about that?

Last night, I remembered that I could watch Netflix, specifically Aziz Ansari's Master of None. Ansari is a very special guy, smart, earnest, funny, in all ways a great American and the hope of our nation: an immigrant kid with an open mind and heart and courage.

Home envy

Natalie and I went out for driving practice on Sunday in Greenwood, a neighborhood my mom had suggested owing to its high median age and complete lack of through traffic. It was the second time we had practiced there, and it was a great idea, even if we forgot to grab the "Student Driver" magnet we had ordered from some very large online emporium of all kinds of goods, the name of which momentarily escapes me...

At any rate, we drove around slowly -- never exceeding 22 miles per hour -- for an hour, and it was just the kind of quality time I have come to cherish with Natalie. Quiet time to talk about nothing and everything.

It did give me time to look at the houses back there, and I confess to envying some of them. Not the biggest and swankiest, mind you, but some of the older ones, some with circular drives and redolent of gentrydom. I found myself wondering why it was I wasn't friends with many people in houses like that. Partially because I'm not that old -- and I think these are likely homes that have had long-time owners -- and partially because I haven't expressly sought to hang out with the affluent. Building relationships with the moneyed was never a clear goal for me, though at this juncture, now that I am in the business of helping people with their finances, it seems that it might have been wise for it to have been. Whatevs.

At any rate, I gaze upon these homes and have no doubt ridiculously idealized fantasies about the tranquil lives of the people who live in them. I know intellectually that this is absurd, yet I slip and slide into it anyway. It's particularly silly given that our house is itself quite nice, and our life looks quite tranquil, and by most objective measures is. Oh well. Back to work.

Heard while on a run

At the tail end of my run in Duke Forest yesterday, after I had crossed the weir or low bridge or whatever you call it, where I had to remove my shoes and wade through the rather chilly water, I was coming up the big hill headed back towards Whitfield, when off to my right I heard the most profound chorus of birds chirping and screeching.  Off to the left, nothing. I stopped and listened, trying to figure out what was up, but it exceeded my pay grade.  For a few moments it died back, then they were at it again, making a world of noise about something.

I was tempted to set off through the woods in the direction of the assembled avians, but thought better of it, fearing something out of Hitchcock. I kept going. After all, I had told Graham we were headed to Flyleaf to pick up some books, and I needed to keep my word, lest he do nothing but lay on his bed all afternoon and read.

Not that that's all bad.

Father figures

I went to the doctor this week for my annual check-up, and when I told him that I was turning 50 he came over and drew a little declining graph for me and said: "This is what happens when we age, we cruise along on our youth for a while, but then when we turn 50 things start to break down pretty quickly." Then he drew another line, extending the period of decline further out and continued "But there are ways we can manage this process, with regular exercise, good diet, cherishing and maintaining relationships with our spouses, children, and friends..." Then he recommended a book about aging.

You would think that it would be a bummer to get this lecture, but the fact is, I was so happy to receive this wisdom, because he was cheerful, upbeat, direct, earnest and -- and this is the most important thing -- he was an older male, with grey hair, even more than me.  I have been seeing him for years, and even though I'm not sure he remembers me that well, I remember him, because I so thirst for authoritative father figures.

First Mary's dad -- whom I adored  -- died in 2009, then my dad, with whom I had a very complicated relationship, and he could never offer me this kind of guidance so directly. Today after my Al Anon meeting I went out for coffee with some other guys, including a guy who's an Episcopal priest and who could be my sponsor. I haven't had a sponsor for a few months, I've never had the perfect one. I found myself evaluating him -- could he be the guy who could be my conversational security blanket?

Anyway, I have to recognize that this is all very silly, because of course no one has all the answers, and I do have a pretty solid support network in my mom, my sister, Mary, and all my excellent friends. But the myth of some grey-haired guy who can offer me easy answers lurks there viscerally, barely subcutaneous, waiting to erupt at the slightest provocation.

Sometimes. But now it is time to take Graham to martial arts. And then we will listen to Click and Clack on the drive back home. Graham is fond in particular of the sign off at the very end, when they say something like:  "And now, even though Robert Siegel reaches for his revolver every time he hears us say it, this is NPR."

My Struggle, Volume 1

I have alluded to the fact that I was taking up Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, and now I have done so. I see what all the hype was about.

The first volume is quite something. It is all about his father, and his father's death, and his father's alcoholism, and growing up listening to alt rock and trying to get girls' attention. Obviously, it was close to home.

It is difficult to say what it is about Knausgaard, except to say that it is just all there on the page, he holds nothing back, he is intensely present and open. Probably the most compelling part of it was when he and his brother labor intensively to clean up the wreckage into which his father and his grandmother had let her home sink as he drank himself to death, and she, it turns out, helped him. Knausgaard is unflinching in discussing, for instance, how his grandmother routinely pees while sitting in a chair in the kitchen or living room.

Again, it's hard to describe, without actually working hard at it, and lord knows it is altogether too late for that. Just read it.

Inspiration

Natalie today found out that she had not gotten in to Duke TIP this summer, she's on a wait list. It's just because there's so much demand, we had gotten the application in on time, she just wasn't randomly selected to get into one of her chosen courses.

This saddens her, because she totally loves TIP and has made many besties there over the last couple of years. And yet, she bore it all with characteristic aplomb and didn't let it get her down. She just asked if she could go to debate camp instead if she doesn't get in off the wait list.

How she keeps a good attitude in spite of disappointment never ceases to marvel and inspire me. Me, Mr. Gloom and Doom, who awakes often at 4:30 in the morning obsessing about this or that, unable to get back to sleep. It fills me with immense pride to see her press forward, seemingly in possession of a somatic kind of gratitude that I must continually and laboriously cultivate.

Childhood as war, and the lamentable and self-perpetuating logic of self-segregation

An African-American guy who was a schoolmate a couple of years younger than me from elementary school through high school died recently. I don't know what the proximate cause of death was, though I know he had had a stroke a couple of years before and never quite recovered.

I never really knew the guy all through school, though after the advent of Facebook I saw him post a lot there and came to realize that he was a very special soul with a keen intellect. So I got his number and went and had lunch with him, and we had a phenomenal conversation about many things we shared, from substance abuse issues to a kid with autism to...  Not long before he died, I took him to the funeral of another mutual friend, and we had another fine conversation. He was a special guy, though I think most people are if you are able to find time to talk with them,

The fact is, I've never really known that many black guys well. Part of it is because, and I have written about this before, childhood was a bit like war for me. I was skinny, with buck teeth, a geek, I didn't feel like I fit in. Then mom got me some braces and protected me from being skipped forward a grade, and puberty treated me well athletically, so that I was able to become a contributor to some high-powered sports teams, and briefly even a star on the track team, and I had some very pretty girlfriends. All this was very good for my ego, but it didn't fill all the holes.

I was never able to be much of a player at any of the mainstream sports, especially basketball, yearn and strive though I might (and I did). Aside from having some teammates on 4x400 relays in club track and field, the basketball court was the only place I ever spent much time with black guys.

For whatever reason, they didn't get placed into the advanced academic courses where I found myself: honors and AP this and that. Even in the era of integration, I was effectively in an almost entirely segregated school context. And whatever social, romantic and athletic success I might have had, the classroom was my home court. That was where I proved myself and fought to dominate. I don't think I was ever nasty about it, it was just home court where I fought off the demons of insufficiency that stormed inside me.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is this: childhood and adolescence were always proving grounds for me, and it was honestly difficult to make the time to know anyone particularly well, outside of the people I had known forever. Boys don't have deep conversations with one another, even when smoking pot and thinking that they are. We mostly jousted and jockeyed for position, formed cliques and bonds, told jokes to make one another laugh, and so on. And the gaps were particularly huge with people from social strata other than our own.

In this sense, I think, social networks are an pretty positive thing, because we get to see our peers let down their hair and share about what they care about. There is a lot of fronting and jockeying on Facebook, to be sure, but a lot of people being real as well. And if you push through the wall of the network and make time to get to know people, there are amazing things there.

But the Dunbar number still applies. It is very hard to get to know more than a certain number of people well within the context of 24/7/365.

In any case, this post has drifted, let me try to bring it back to where it started. My point is this: though as an educated white male in the South I would have objectively appeared to be in a position of strength as a child, I was in fact hounded and driven by insecurities, and thereby pushed into a sort of war mode. I felt myself inferior to black guys on the basketball court, which was a huge proving ground. I wasn't particularly good at talking to anybody. So I probably isolated myself and didn't develop relationships with people at all, and black people in particular. So that now, objectively considered, my life continues to be segregated, certainly more so than I would like for it to be. And this trend has self-reinforcing tendencies unless I try hard to break free of it.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

I have slouched in recent months if not years on writing book and movie reviews, which used to be a regular feature here on the blog. Part of it is that we haven't been watching movies as much as television shows.  But I have been reading.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust, by John Coates, is a tour de force, but it is not light reading. He was a trader at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank before going back to Cambridge to get a PhD in Neuroscience, if there is such a field. He writes about various parts of and influences on our brain and neurological systems: the amygdala, the hypothalamus, testosterone, dopamine, cortisol and a bunch of other stuff that I honestly can't remember, but roughly it's about how our brains and nervous systems process danger and stress and react to it, how we influence those around us in so doing -- and thereby shade into the realm of an epidemiology of fear and stress -- how some individuals do better than others, and how institutions, particularly financial institutions, could reform themselves to help them do a better job handling other people's money.

Obviously, this is a pertinent book here at the beginning of 2016, a stressful time when everyone in the world is trying to figure out what is happening, what will happen next, and what to do about it. I wish I could retain it all and synopsize it neatly for you, but I think the moral to the story is this: there is a profoundly physical component to how we handle stress, including market stress, and that physical component is in turn informed by our habits and lived experience, Over time, we can coach ourselves to be less reactive.

Blech. I should have written this weeks ago, when I finished the book. Instead I started reading another one.

Much obliged

As I mentioned before, I've been listening to a Gretchen Rubin book in my car, to wit Better Than Before. My sister Leslie said the book had been helpful to her in some regards. Of course, as I listen,, part of me is gently seething, because Gretchen and I were in college together and I envy her her incredible success. But mostly I have to admit she's worked her butt off to be as successful as she is, and that she's done good work. It's certainly better than any book I've ever published, and she seems genuinely motivated to help people with her work.

So Gretchen divides the world into four categories of people, as laid out below.

• Upholder—accepts rules, whether from outside or inside. An upholder meets deadlines, follows doctor’s order, keeps a New Year’s resolution. I am an Upholder, 100%.
• Questioner—questions rules and accepts them only if they make sense. They may choose to follow rules, or not, according to their judgment.
• Rebel—flouts rules, from outside or inside. They resist control. Give a rebel a rule, and the rebel will want to do the very opposite thing.
• Obliger—accepts outside rules, but doesn’t like to adopt self-imposed rules.

And she's got a little quiz you can take to see which one you are. In a moment of weakness, I took the quiz, and was somewhat astonished when it told me that I am not a Questioner, nor a Rebel, but an Obliger.  Part of me wanted to go back and retake the quiz, but I know that my retake would be shaded by my resistance to my initial diagnosis.

Now I know these types of instruments are not super-scientific and all that, but still, I was mildly galled. But, as I reflect on it, there is certainly an element of truth to this confusion. Although, on the face of it, going out and getting a PhD in Russian Literature while sprouting all manner of facial hair, spouting some wacky theoretical jive, and partying pretty hearty might appear rebellious, I was in many ways seeking my dad's attention and approval. And since I left that life, I have worked very hard to be a pretty stand-up bourgie guy and consider myself deeply obligated to my family. For example, even as I type I am watching the clock and thinking about the sequence of the evening:  watch Star Trek Next Gen with Graham, make fire, discuss Europe trip, watch Downton Abbey with Mary, get to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get back out there tomorrow and earn money to support all of this and serve my clients well.

I even feel somewhat obliged to blog, because I know I have a small but dedicated readership -- and I love and thank you all -- who might bail on me if I let down on some sort of regularity in posting.

At times I have felt like the Giving Tree, who gives all and has nothing left for himself. But this is a bad dynamic and it encourages me to be pissy with everyone. The fact is, I love the blog, I love Star Trek, I love my family and making fires, etc. But it is perhaps symptomatic that I find it very hard to imagine living without them, because I don't know what my purpose in life would be.

Perchance to dream

For two nights in a row, Graham has been asleep by the time I went in to his room to snuggle with him. Last night it couldn't have been two minutes between his leaving the bathroom from brushing his teeth and me making my way in there and discovering him somewhat comatose.

In so many ways, I think that this is a worthy goal in life in general. To be so tired when going to sleep that you just pass out, and to have adequate trust in the world that you stay asleep blissfully until morning.

Today I've been out shoveling snow, which is great work to achieve the same effect for me. In fact I was just about to rewrite this post, but then I thought to search my blog to see if I had written the same thought before. Of course I had.

Now must eat lunch.

Inspector Gadget

At the library yesterday, I grabbed the copy of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget from the hold shelf and then was headed to the nave portion of the building to sit and read while Graham did his digging around for fresh books. On the way there, I ran into someone from the high school, and the conversation quickly moved over to Facebook. She said that she was able to see what I was up to, but was shy about posting herself. I assured her that it was the United States of America, and that no one was obliged to post anything if they didn't want to.

And then I sat down and continued reading the book, which I had started to peruse at David and Carol's in Princeton over Christmas. Lanier's core thesis is that human relations are coming to be defined by the internet and social media, that we are being flattened by the standards that they impose, and that this is an unqualified ill. So, for example, people feeling somehow obliged to post on Facebook and needing to apologize for not doing so. I kept reading, and I come these exhortations:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out

Hmmmm. These are some real and legitimate thoughts. Obviously, this blog is pseudonymized, for a number of reasons. For one, I don't want to sit here sweating the editing. I'd rather just write and let it flow. Just as importantly, I want to feel free to rail and be free with the topics I choose and what I open up about without worrying about colleagues and clients being able to Google me easily.

In some sense, I think that Lanier is overly focused on the impact of social media. Yes it is a little odd that people such as myself can have multiple selves: the blog me, where I dig deep, the Facebook me, where I mostly perform, and the LinkedIn me, where I put my professional face forward. I think that people often had these same layers pre-social media, but they were instantiated differently.

But he is doing some real and worthy thinking in this book and I will keep right on reading it, along with the other stuff I'm reading, right now Knausgaard (loving it) and Kahneman (struggling mightily), while listening to Gretchen Rubin in the car.

Yesterday

Yesterday was an excellent day.  I went to my morning meeting, then took Graham to martial arts. I have been having both him and Natalie sit in the front seat with me, both to help them mentally progress towards adulthood by putting them on nearly equal footing with the driver, but also to get me to think of them as quasi-adults. Also so their perception of the road will be more like that of a driver, in terms of speed of things approaching, etc.

Teaching Natalie to drive is leading me to believe this is prudent and wise. I have been surprised at how difficult it is for her to judge where curbs are, etc. Partially this is because I have never tought anyone to drive before, but I think it may also have to do with her having spent much less time on a bicycle than I did as a kid, and much less time driving go carts, bumper cars, and the like.  Whatever. In so many regards she is so much more educated and mature than I was at her age, I think. It's pretty marvelous, honestly.

While at martial arts, mom called and asked that we come to her house for a little while to spend a little time with her husband David, who's been having some health challenges and is a little isolated around the house. So we did that, and watched a good chunk of Carolina playing State.  Graham doesn't watch enough basketball, relative to the other boys his age around here, so it is definitely good for him to watch and develop a better understanding of the game and the players, so he can take part in that part of teen boy (or, for now, "late tween boy") bonding.

We hurried home before the game was over to beat the traffic, and I went out for a longish run in Duke Forest. A good thing to do, and I did it while a radio interview I had taped back in December aired on WCHL.

After I got home, I took Natalie out for driving practice, then watched Star Trek with Graham. After she had dinner, Natalie deigned to read with me on the couch, and I put a blanked over our feet and we played footsie. Our cat Rascal even sat on our feet briefly, completing the trifecta. To cap it off, Natalie watched a couple of episodes of Parks and Rec with me and Mary while we watched dinner.

So when I add it all up I probably spent a total of three hours with Natalie, and a similar amount of time with Graham. Yes, we were watching TV for part of it, co-consuming narratives, as I like to think of it. But that's OK. There were good discussions in there too. I won't delve into them here, but it was quality time.

The urge to invade

I was at a networking event, a happy hour, out in RTP yesterday evening and I saw a young woman standing alone.  Mid-20s, African-American, hipster, a couple of extra pounds, holding a beer. I knew she wasn't likely to become a client, and that's why I was there, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to say hello. She looked so lonely.

Turned out she was looking for her next gig, had some science credentials and some technical chops, but didn't really have the job she wanted.  We talked for a little while, exchanged cards.  I thought of a neighbor with whom I might connect her and told her to ping me on LinkedIn.

Then I went and sat down to talk to some white guys with grey hair. A more likely audience for a guy like me. Turns out one of those guys was an advisor himself, a colleague of my boy Riguz.  As I was bonding with these members of my tribe, I looked back up at the black youngster. She was sitting alone, slumping, disheartened.

Today I was processing my cards from last night and I looked her up on LinkedIn. Turns out, she went to an Ivy League school. I had to resist the temptation to call her up, ask her to send me her resume, and then forward it to my neighbor.

But where does this intercessory impulse come from? In general, there's really nothing better than hooking someone up with a job. I love doing it like little else. I suspect I saw a little of myself in her. When I was her age, I was much more fucked up, much less functional than her even. I wouldn't even have gone to an event like that, and if I had gone, I would have been pounding the free beer and trying to get up with a young lady or another.

Certainly I hadn't done anything whatsoever to make myself marketable to an employer. That was beneath me.  I so wish somebody had been able to pierce my shell at that age and guide me towards reasonable employment.  Lord knows my mom tried, I just wasn't ready, for a variety of reasons.

So yes, I want to nanny this nice young woman.

When what I really need to be doing is finding clients.

This is what I think of as my Rip Van Winkle instinct. Attentive readers will recall that what got old Rip banished from his household was his tendency to help his neighbors with their household projects, and not do jack around his own house. So he went on top of a mountain and slept for 20 years.

Pulling back the veil

I took Natalie for driving practice yesterday at the UNC Friday Center parking lots, which is an area we are getting to know quite well, between using it for biking practice for Graham and now this. On the way there, I began a discussion with Natalie of some of the big topics: including some of the complexities of my career path and how much stress they have induced at times.

I wanted to talk to her about goal-directedness in her own educational path, which is as thorny a question as one can get on. On the one hand, it's good for her to have a sense of the things she likes and to explore them in depth, and she is as pre-law as you can get and still be in high school. On the other hand, she's not even fricking 16 yet, and we want for her to retain an openness to the world and a sense of wonder and not get in this paranoid lock-down if-I-don't-do-every-extracurricular-possible-I-won't-get-into-Yale-and-my-life-will-be-over mindset, as is all too encouraged in today's high-performing high school cultures.

But how to direct her? In the course of the discussion, I actually talked to her about my own stress symptoms, some of which she observes in mornings, and also when I'm cranky and irritable, and then towards the end I said what I think is true, which is that parents feed the mental illness of Ivy League focus because we fear for the future because the world has been changing so quickly. (At least in every regard except that affluent white people have it easier than others.)

And in so doing, I pulled back the veil of parental infallibility, under which I labored until relatively late in adolescence. I mean, I saw my dad do some fucked up shit, which I won't go into here, and part of me knew my mom was in some way imperfect too, but the bedrock elemental presupposition that my parents were more or less perfect and that money more or less grew on trees persisted for a long long time.

And I wonder whether it was wise to have pulled back the veil, to have said to her directly that we don't know certain things, that we have fears, and that they to no small extent make us who we are as "grown ups."  Of course she knows. But it's sort of like Santa and the Easter Bunny, only bigger.

The Long and the Short of it

In a very real sense, as consciousnesses participating in the world, as cogitos, all we have is time, and therefore the most important decisions we make involve time allocation and time management. Most of these decisions involve balancing long-, middle-, and short-term considerations. Money, as a unit of value representing stored labor (expended time), facilitates the management of time. It is a means, in a sense, of time-shifting. To a limited extend, one can work hard in the present and store up units of time for the future.

The problem is, we don't know when we're going to die. X-factors like cancer, inattentive driving (on our own part of others'), and chronic diseases threaten us at all times. These risks can be managed to a certain extent by managing how we behave (diet, exercise, sleep, mindful vehicle maintenance and driving, etc.), but there are significant risks that lie well outside our spans of influence.

On Friday, I went to the funeral of the dad of a family that were neighbors of ours in Durham 45-odd years ago and who went to the same church as us. Good people, not our twins in every way, but fine folx. One of the sons in the family spoke about his dad during the service, and he told stories of the great vacations they had gone on as kids and the memories they had made together, all six of them driving across the country to California in a station wagon ("I'm not sure that's even legal anymore") or circling the Arc de Triomphe five times before figuring out how to exit the traffic circle. Great stuff.

Which really brings it home that the most important decisions I can make now are to build strong memories for my family, and yes, vacations are an important part of it. We're supposed to travel to the UK this summer, and I know I really need to pull the trigger and start booking the trip, even though the conservative part of me keeps whispering that my practice is not yet generating enough revenue to run the household in a cashflow neutral way, and the markets are kind of iffy, to say the least.

Which raises another question. How important is it, fundamentally, that vacations be fancy? In some sense, traveling broadly exposes one's kids to a variety of the world and opens their eyes to difference.  I know the UK ain't that exotic, but I've got Graham's food allergies to think about, and they both love Hogwarts.

One the other hand, "seeing the world" is really just a marker of class status, a way to say "we are rich enough to travel.," Good memories can be formed locally too.

On balance, though, I really need to just pull the trigger and get this done.

Mom tells the story of how, in 1988, she and I were set to go travelling in Europe right after I graduated from college, and she got a phone call with a fantastic consulting opportunity. The guy who called her said she should come to Chicago or wherever right then. We were at the airport. She said no. We had a great trip. She got the gig.

Little things with Natalie

Coming back into the house just now, I heard music coming from Natalie's room: the soundtrack of Hamilton, which both of my kids have been enjoying in the privacy of their own earbuds ever since the CD that Beth sent came in the mail some time back. There is something exceptionally joyous about hearing music played aloud by these kids whose musical culture has been almost primarily individual (although they do listen to the same songs and like to sing along at times).

To digress slightly from where I thought this post was going when I started 2 minutes ago, I wonder how the fundamental nature of pop music might have shifted due to this change in mode of consumption. It kind of reminds me of the shift Ian Watt details in his 1957 The Rise of the Novel, which looked at how the novel, as it emerged in the 1800s via Samuel Richardson, Daniel Defoe, and Henry Fielding, marked the emergence of the bourgeois individual, as it was the first major narrative art form to be ingested and digested individually, as opposed to collectively (think drama). And the novel of the time focused on the inner world of individuals.

So if teenagers get their music primarily from earbuds, is the narrative content of music shifting? And the relationship of the consuming individual to that narrative?

Blah blah blah


She also watches TV shows on her phone and her new laptop in her room, but she watches with Mary and me in the rec room a little. I think I may have mentioned how much fun it is to sing along with the theme song of Parks and Rec with her.  Another thing we enjoy together is, when Netflix (really I think it's Time Warner) is having buffering issues in the middle of shows and we get a little status bar at the bottom of a black screen that tells us that the show is loading, each time the bar moves a little Natalie and I have a little game of saying "It moved!" to celebrate its progress. It freaks out our cat a little. Oh well.

Facebook

All too often I find myself scrolling through my feed, looking at pictures, watching videos, reading things my friends post. The real problem is not that Facebook is vapid, but that I am blessed with an incredible set of friends that put me in touch with a wide variety of types of discourse, and who have lovely children. It does, to some extent, blunt my initiative at times and my ability to peel out and express my own coherent thoughts. Oh well.

And yes, Zappo's does try to sell me shoes, even though I already bought some.

In with the new?

Two things I like to read as one year turns into the next are the Economist's Holiday Double Issue, which is always full of stories about a bunch of random stuff from the past and from odd corners of the globe and of human experience, and the New York Times Magazine's "The Lives They Led" issue, which has short sketches of people who died in the past year. I always intend to read, but don't always read as much of, the Economist's forward-looking issue about the year coming up, with articles by various bigwigs.

Why is that, I ask myself? Does this mean I am essentially more retrospective than prospective in orientation? Perhaps, indeed probably. Or maybe it is just because I am skeptical about people's ability to predict the future, beyond its simple arrival. Or the fact that, when people are speaking of the future, they are intensely likely to "talk their book," which is to say peddle the version of the future they would like to see happen.

But that's true in a sense of the past as well.

In any event, the intensity with which the experience of individuals resonates with me indicates to me that I am doing the right thing by working with individuals, as opposed to trying to become a true investment analyst and manage pools of money for a fund or institutions.

For now, it's time to gear up and take Graham for a run over in Carolina North, which we used to refer to as "the woods" when I grew up in Glen Heights.